A place on its own:  Re-imagining "home" in late-Victorian slum fiction.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 212
Description: The powerful influence which the slum exerted on the Victorian imagination is evident in the enormous body of fictional and non-fictional accounts of urban poverty produced during the nineteenth century. During the 1880s and '90s in particular, the slum became a familiar site for literary representation. The many novels written about slum life during this period provide an opportunity to examine antithetical versions of Victorian domesticity. Unlike Ruskin's celebrated domestic model, outlined in Sesame and Lilies (1865), slum domiciles did not exclude injury, terror, doubt and division; rather they incorporated these very elements, producing homes in which more familiar domestic scenes are reproduced in inverted, distorted or parodic form. In the fictional slum, normative domestic ideology is interrogated, and new social possibilities are rehearsed. The fictional slum's seclusion from the surrounding city makes it particularly eligible as site for a re-writing of the domestic narrative.There are four defining tropes which are repeatedly used in slum fiction: the labyrinth, the stage, the prison and the sanctuary. These contradictory images serve to underscore the slum's identity as an anti-domestic locus by violating and/or parodying more standard images of home. These tropes work together to produce a locus where matters which are only subliminally present in more familiar domestic surroundings may be fully articulated. As in Freud's model of psychological repression, culturally unheimlich ("uncanny/unhomelike") material which cannot be fully recognised in the heimlich realm of everyday domestic life finds expression in the shadowy underworld of the slums. Characters who visit the fictional slum frequently discover fulfillment there; almost invariably, this involves the recuperation of missing, suppressed or occluded aspects of their own former lives. Their adventures mirror the complex reconfiguration of Victorian domestic ideology which was taking place not only in contemporary slum fiction but on many other fronts as well.
Notes: Adviser:  Jill Matus.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-10, Section: A, page: 3814.